Johnny Barrows

I wish someone would put Fred's directorial debut out in a decent widescreen DVD. The pan and scan versions out there now are so tightly cropped that they add a quality of hilarity even when the film is actually hitting some pretty serious notes (the pan and scan job is so bad it is almost like some kind of Austin Powers gag). But that said, I'm sure that much of the film would still be hilariously inept in any aspect ratio. In fact, the climax features THE most unintentionally comical Kung Fu fight ever put to film. I mean how often have you seen an actor start a butt-kicking by suddenly making snake moves with his hands and going "ASsssssssssshhhhhhhhsh sh sh sh"?

But there are some very effective moments as well, especially a brief cameo from Elliot Gould, who must have hit upon VERY hard times in the five years between MASH and this. And the sequence in which Johhny lets loose his anger by blasting and summarily cremating a mob boss almost seems like it's from another, much better, movie.

Anyway, it's a crazy hodgepodge, but I'd still like to see it in the original widescreen. Fred rules!

**SPOILER ALERT** Drummed out of the US Army for slugging his CO Capt. O'Malley, Aaron Banks, Johnny Barrows, Fred Williamson, drifts into town looking for a job ending up instead beaten and robbed by a couple of homeboys as soon as he leaves the bus.

Picked up by the cops thinking that he's a homeless drunk, homeless yes drunk no, Johnny gets worked over again at the jail house until the precinct captain who recognized Johnny as a star high school and collage football player, and decorated Vietnam War Vet, intervenes. At first Johnny is nothing but a shell of his former self going around town looking for a job as well as a free meal. While on skid row Johnny runs into Elliott Gould playing the part of a hobo wise-man who's name, Prof.Theodore Rasputin Waterhouse, is longer then the part that he has in the movie. We see Theodore teach Johnny the fine points of living and surviving on the streets by getting a unsuspecting soul, at a hot-dog stand, to share his frankfurter with him and Johnny.

Johnny had earlier gotten to know Mafiso bigwig Mario Racconi, Stuart Whitman, when he tried to get a free meal of spaghetti and meatballs at his restaurant which Mario overruled his angry chef, Jan J. Madrid, and gave him. Johnny also met Mario's girlfriend Nancy, Jenny Sherman, who took a strange liking to the wandering and homeless vet. It's when Mario offered Johnny a job as a hit-man for his organization he respectfully turned it down having done enough hit's in Nam then he would like to remember.

Still out to make an honest living Johnny ends up cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors at Richard's, R.G Armstrong, gas station but the cheap and ungrateful Richard, after Johnny broke his back working for him, gives Johnny a measly 21 dollars that comes out to something like .70 a day, for the month that he was employed by him. This leads Johnny to lose his cool and Richard to lose a couple of his teeth. Ending up again at the jail-house Johnny is set free with the help of the Racconi mob who got the now scared to death Richard to drop all charges against Johnny.

Mario together with his father Mafia Don Racconi, Luther Adler,had been gunned down by the rival De Vince Mob at a meeting of the minds between the two gang leaders about the trafficking of deadly and illegal drugs on the streets of L.A which Don Racconi was deathly against. With Mario surviving the shoot-out, his father Don Racconi didn't, he gets Johnny to agree to hit the De Vincie mob as a favor to him and Nancy whom Johnny has since fallen in love with.

Knocking off the entire De Vince Mob that included Don De Vince, Anthony Caruso, and his young and schmucky son Tony, Roddy McDowall, Johnny didn't realize that Tony was actually Nancy's man! Tony was planning with Nancy to get his father's and the Racconi Mob to kill each other off and then take take off with Nancy and both mob's assets to Mexico.

During the final stages of warfare with the De Vince mob Johnny come to battle it out again with the former Capt. O'Malley Johnny's old Army CO, who got him canned out of the service, who's now a martial arts hit man for the De Vincie's. O'Malley was no pushover using karate and judo tactics on Johnny but in the end Johnny get's the upper hand by returning a deadly flying star back to O'Malley throat.

The ending of "Mean Johnny Barrows" was a bit confusing not that Johnny was doubled-crossed by Nancy, whom we already knew was two-timing him, but the way Nancy was finished off seemed a bit out of place; stepping on a land mine in lovely and crime-free Malibu?

I got this film as part of this budget "Bad Brothas, Mean Mothas" boxed set, and watched this one first, because it stars Fred "Super-stud" Willaimson. I was surprised at what different and ambitous movie this is. Whether it lives up to all that ambition...

Rather than a typical revenge fantasy (nothing wrong with those, but...) this film follows Johnny B. as he tries to get a job and resist joining the mob after being dishonorably discharged from the army for striking a white officer (after being, to put it lightly, provoked).

It takes a while as the film unfolds to realize that he's not, as usually happens in these movies, going to get p***ed and get even. He is arrested and tormented by the police to which he won't even give his name or say anything. For a while I thought he was dazed by being beaten earlier, but by the time he gets to the police station he should be more coherent. Then I thought "Well, he's just so COOL that he won't even dignify those cops by talking to them," but then that falls apart as well and... I just don't know why he wouldn't talk. Because it's a plot point, I suspect.

The main idea of the story is Johnny trying to get a real job, and resist the mobsters who are offering him big money to become a hit man.

(SPOILERS AHEAD----->)The arc of the movie hinges on Johnny's love for a woman (a WHITE woman, no less), which we are supposed to understand leads to him finally agreeing to work for the mob in order to avenge her rape. Sadly, this entire aspect of the film just doesn't come off at all, as there is barely any connection between him and the woman, there is no discernible chemistry between them... there's just nothing.

(more spoilers here:) Another interesting thing about the structure of the film is how Johnny ends up the head of this crime organization at the end. It's just kind of interesting and unexpected. Then he offers his love to the woman, and instead of saying "Yes Johnny, take me anywhere and make love to me all day and all night! Do it right here! Do it right now!" like any sane woman or man would do, she... has a different reaction. And this leads to another surprising thing: the ending, which I totally didn't expect, but won't give away.

This movie being directed by Fred himself adds a dimension to all the adoring shots of himself glaring face-on into the camera, but hey, he looks great and he knows it. I also like the change when he finally gets into those slick suits. The cheap DVD I got REALLY suffers from not being widescreen, as Fred seems to like to place his characters on opposite ends of the screen, and it seemed like more than half of the movie featured half a person's face or shuttled back and forth between the ends of the screen.

A lot of people posting here have talked about how slow this movie is... I think because they're expecting a traditional revenge tale. This movie is not the greatest, but I think it deserves to be admired for the unconventionality of the story, and the aspects of 70s black culture (namely trying to get a decent job without any credentials, the difficulty of avoiding drawn into crime, in addition to the hammered in "plight of the veteran" aspects) that you don't see covered in other movies, which I think makes it kind of a little gem.

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I found this flick on a three movie DVD compilation of Fred Williamson films for around three or four bucks. I discovered it at the supermarket of all places and what a return on that initial four dollar investment (If you strung together the randomly occurring "good bits" from all three shows you'd have one cool, effectively kick-ass movie-- it wouldn't make any sense of course but it'd be chock full of good bits!).

I love Fred Williamson-- he's like the funky love-child of John Cassavetes and Jim Brown. There may be rambling and fumbled story lines and plot focus, the quality of the production may waver and shift with the tenuous availability of funds, always some friends-doing-a-favor-casting, bizarre and clunky setups, obtuse angles and ham-fisted camera work, self-indulgent faux-introspective montage, and lots of technical sloppiness and cheap shortcuts are all evident throughout his oeuvre. But the fervent passion and pure love for cinema all seem to somehow leak through like tepid, runny kindergarten paste holding everything together by some incredulous force of will. Fred's shrewd and clever will.

Fred may not be easily filed in the same category with directors of such influence and artistic gravitas as Lang, Welles, or Kurosawa, but they probably wouldn't mind hanging out with him over a couple of drinks and some girls.

Mean Johnny Barrows is not a good movie. But it is fun, goofy, dumb, sleazy, cheap, silly and thrilling. For the right pair of eyes that delight in the subtle contextual appreciations of Blaxploitation, Crime/Mob Pictures, or just choice 1970's trashy film-making it is an inimitable masterpiece.

The casting is priceless. Luther Adler is perfect as a post-Godfather era cardboard cut-out patriarch with the additional ludicrous premise of having Roddy McDowall play his own son. McDowall's hairstyle alone is enough to justify purchasing this movie, with the appearance of a melting dollop of brown Cool Whip. He frets and blanches and swallows as a Fredoesque nervous Nellie, uncomfortable with his familial role as oldest son and next-in-line Family Boss.

The astounding Stuart Whitman plays a rival Mob Boss who owns an Italian Restaurant and spends most of the time interfering in the kitchen. His hair also invokes an instinctual fight-or-flight response like Mary-Tyler Moore at an Alice Cooper concert. He has a strange tendency to instantaneously change entire outfits without warning in a singular scene. He also keeps one arm stiffly bent at chest level at all times for no discernible reason whatsoever and in most scenes appears to have been sleeping in his wardrobe, woken up only seconds before filming any of his takes.

R.G. Armstong is undeniably electrifying as the filling station owner who reluctantly gives the jobless and homeless Mean Johnny Barrows employment for no other reason than he needs someone to clean his bathrooms.

And Elliot Gould makes his legendary "Special Appearance" as the worlds most colorful and erudite hobo in motion picture history.

There's lots of music and walking sequences, bad suits, nasty cops, bigotry, ambition, and eating out of garbage cans. There's romance and violence and lots of giant 70's cars pulling in and out of driveways, all inevitably leading up to fisticuffs and gratuitous gun play, of course.

I would say if you have four bucks in change floating around inside your couch or car or even in the pockets of an old coat in storage somewhere and you have developed an appreciation for this enjoyable genre, trade in those rolls of pennies and pick it up! 'Cause at the end of the day, it's all about Fred.

I just want to say that this is a lot better than the last film I watched with Fred Williamson (Adios Amigo). But Mean Johnny Barrows is a crime film that has an interesting story, but is poorly executed across the big screen due to lousy direction from star Fred Williamson. In this snoozefest he is kicked out of the army for striking an officer. He then has a streak of bad luck starting with a beat down by the police. Then our hero is a hobo, homeless in extreme poverty. He then moves on up by scrubbing toilets in a gas station before taking a job as mob hitman. What else happens is hazy in memory due to struggling to stay awake in this poorly put together snoozefest. As a Fred Williamson fan, Mean Johnny Barrows is a let down and a bummer. Even though some of his films are of shoddy quality, Fred Williamson is a really cool and bad ass dude. His finer qualities don't save this stinker and I would advise interested parties to skip this one.